https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=U2skAMaVJ4E
The story of Adam and Eve represents the fruit as producing a psychological transformation. And so, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is an abstraction across trees, and it’s trying to say, here’s something that’s common across trees. It’s a fruit that’s common across trees. It’s something like that. And so, the fruit that’s common across trees is something you might call food. Fair enough, that’s a generalization. But here’s something that’s even more cool. The food that’s stable across the entire domain of food isn’t food, it’s information. It’s information. And we use the same bloody circuits in our brain to forage for information that squirrels use to forage for food, that animals use to forage for food. It’s the same circuit. And why is that? Because we figured out that knowing where things is, knowing where the food is, is more important than having the food. And so, knowing where the food is is a form of meta-food. Information is a form of meta-food. And once you… And well, that’s why we’re information foragers. And so, once you grasp that, and that idea is embedded into the story of Adam and Eve. So, whatever it is that they ingest is a form of meta-food. It’s information. And we’ll trade food for information, right? So, if you’re stuck on the edge of the highway, and your hood’s up, and your going-places thing has turned into a pile of junk that you don’t understand, and somebody pulls up beside you, and they’re a mechanic, and they point to something and say, well, just put that wire back on there, you’ll immediately give them a sandwich, right? Or you’ll offer them something in return, you know what I mean? Because they’ve provided you with information that has value. And it has value because it actually provides you with energy, because information provides you with energy, because otherwise, why would we bother with it? And so, food provides energy, but so does information. And so, there’s the idea of food that you abstract from everything you can eat, but then there’s the idea of what you could abstract from all sources of food, and the answer to that would be information. And the trees that are being referred to in Adam and Eve are these meta-trees. They’re not ordinary trees, just like paradise is no ordinary place, just like Adam and Eve are no ordinary people, and just like the logos that God is using at the beginning of time is no ordinary conception. And these aren’t, they’re not metaphors, they’re more than metaphors, they’re, I think of them as hyper-realities, it’s something like that. Is there more real than what you see? They’re more real than the reality that presents itself to you. And lots of things are like that, right? Numbers are like that. We wouldn’t think or abstract if there weren’t things that were more real than what we can see. So, what’s most real? Well, that’s partly what we’re trying to figure out. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life, also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and became into four heads. That’s produced a tremendous amount of speculation. Now, you know, the Garden of Eden is also the holy city. That’s another way of thinking about it. Or it’s Jerusalem, right? Or it’s the ideal state, which could be the ideal city, or it could be an ideal state of being, or it could be the ideal psyche. It’s all of those things stacked up at the same time. Right? And this is a Mandela, and this is the Mandela form that people, what would you call, hypothesized, that constituted the structure of paradise. You notice it’s got this cross form. That’s Eden itself, and there’s the center of Eden, and there’s the rivers. Those are rivers, not snakes. Those are the rivers that go out of it. And they’re turned into these Mandela images that are representative of what Jung described as the self, which would be the center element of conscious being that he associated with divinity, I would say. But also with the idea of the holy city. And so, I’m just showing you that to show you where the imagination has taken ideas from. The ideas of paradise. So… The name of the first river is Pisan. That is which compasses the whole land of Hevela, where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good. There’s Bedelium and the Onyx Stone, and the name of the second river is Gihon. The same is it that compasses the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddikel, or Hiddekel. I don’t know. That is it which goes towards the east of Assyria, and the fourth river is the Euphrates. So there’s this strange intermingling there of geography, with mythical geography, right? Which you see happen fairly frequently in the books. And the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to dress it and keep it. Okay, so that’s a good command. That’s what you’re supposed to do, is take care of the damn thing. It was a lot of work to make, right? It took a whole week. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it. For in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die. Well, there’s this bunch of questions there that people have been puzzling over for a long time. Gaudi, he’s a tricky character in the story of Adam and Eve. It’s like, okay, if we can’t eat the damn thing, well, why put it in the garden to begin with? That would be one question. And you made us, and then you told us not to eat this, knowing perfectly well that the first thing we were going to do is eat it, because people are of exactly that type, which is that if you say to them, with their insatiable curiosity, This is all fine and nice, but over here is something you should never look at, and then you leave the room. It’s like everybody’s over there trying to figure out what the hell that thing is instantly, right? Because we’re curious, curious, curious, curious creatures. And so you have to wonder exactly what God was up to here. There’s Gnostic speculation that the original God, this one, was not really a very good God. He was kind of an unconscious, evil God, and that he wanted his creation to be unconscious, and so forbade them from developing consciousness, and that it was a higher God, who, and maybe in the form of the serpent, who tempted human beings towards consciousness. And, you know, that idea got scrubbed out of Classical Christianity pretty early, although there’s something that’s interesting about it, and there are remnants of it in different forms that stayed inside the story. Like the idea that the fall was, you know, a terrible tragedy, but on the other hand, it was the precondition for the greatest event in history, which was the birth of Christ and the redemption of mankind. And so, it’s complicated, let’s put it that way. God only knows what God was up to, but, you know, this is a good example of that ambivalence. And to me, again, that it’s an indication of the sophistication of the people who put these stories together. I also consider this somewhat miraculous, because, you know, if you were just a simple propagandist of sorts, you wouldn’t leave this sort of complexity in the text. You’d just get rid of that, because if you’re a propagandist, everything is supposed to make sense along the ideological plane, and here, God’s supposed to be good. It’s like, well, we better get there to that line, because something’s up with it, and it isn’t obvious what it is, but that isn’t what people did. And to me, that indicates that they were doing two things, is they were trying not to be too careless with the traditions that they were handed. They were touching them at their peril, they were very careful with them, and also that they were actually trying to understand what was going on, because why otherwise keep this? Why not just simplify it? Or maybe just attribute this to the devil, that would be easier than having God do it.